{"id":301,"date":"2007-08-22T19:45:35","date_gmt":"2007-08-23T00:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fiveforks.com\/ted\/2007\/08\/plasma\/"},"modified":"2013-02-03T20:10:34","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T01:10:34","slug":"plasma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2007\/08\/plasma\/","title":{"rendered":"Plasma"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I borrowed <I>The Prestige<\/I> from <A HREF=\"\/ted\/files\/mt\/archive\/2007\/netflix_once_again.html\">Netflix<\/A>. While I wasn&#8217;t crazy about the movie (<A HREF=\"http:\/\/igirder.com\/movies\/2006\/prestige.html\">B<\/A>), one of the side characters was Nikola Tesla. I knew he was an important guy in the history of electricity, but <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nikola_Tesla\">his story<\/A> really is interesting (not as interesting as the movie would have you believe). He is famous for <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tesla_coil\">Tesla coils<\/A> which create huge lightning bolts in science fiction movies. On a practical side he was a proponent of AC electricity for home use despite Thomas Edison having everyone convinced that DC was the way to go. There is a monument to Tesla at Niagara Falls since his work turned their otherwise useless waterfall into a money-making electricity machine (see a <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/tesla\/ins\/niagara.html\">NOVA<\/A> episode dedicated to him).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, there were some really neat Tesla coils in the movie and it reminded me that I was interested in getting one of those plasma lamps. Since I had recently won a $25 gift certificate for using transit to get to work, I thought that the time had come. So the lamp is pictured below:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"plasma1.jpg\" src=\"\/ted\/files\/mt\/archive\/2007\/plasma1.jpg\" width=\"299\" height=\"448\" \/><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nI was pretty excited to get the lamp and very relieved that it wasn&#8217;t broken. In reading up on <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Plasma_lamp\">plasma lamps<\/A> I learned that if you hold a fluorescent bulb next to the lamp that the lamp&#8217;s energy will cause it to fluoresce. I wondered if it would work with a compact fluorescent and it turns out that it does (though not evenly):<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"plasma2.jpg\" src=\"\/ted\/files\/mt\/archive\/2007\/plasma2.jpg\" width=\"448\" height=\"299\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Other than that, it really doesn&#8217;t do that much. I was surprised that it uses a 12V DC adapter for power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I borrowed The Prestige from Netflix. While I wasn&#8217;t crazy about the movie (B), one of the side characters was Nikola Tesla. I knew he was an important guy in the history of electricity, but his story really is interesting (not as interesting as the movie would have you believe). He is famous for &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2007\/08\/plasma\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Plasma&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2050,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/2050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}